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All Books in this Collection
Showing 7953–7968 of 9481 results
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The Players
$22.95Nominated, 2010 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
Two French explorers arrive in Court to charm two ships from the English King. The rest, as they say, is history…` Or perhaps not. Set in the libertine era of Restoration England, The Players embarks on a voyage of discovery with compelling characters, a magical plot, and stunning imagery.
A tale of beginnings and of invention, this remarkable novel takes on the 17th century with a contemporary sensibility. Here, the ability to perform — in Court, on stage, in private quarters, and in the brutal cold of James Bay — might save your life… and Lilly Cole must play along with the best of them.
Sly, provocative, and ingeniously funny, Sweatman’s prose explores the deep well of human motivation, how instinct trumps reason when survival is in question.
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The Pleasure of the Crown
$34.95Anthropologists have traditionally studied Europe’s “others” and the marginalized and excluded within Europe’s and North America’s boundaries. This book turns the anthropologist’s spyglass in the opposite direction: on the law, the institution that quintessentially embodies and reproduces Western power.
The Pleasure of the Crown offers a comprehensive look at how Canadian, particularly British Columbian, society “reveals itself” through its courtroom performances in Aboriginal title litigation. Rather than asking what cultural beliefs and practices First Nations draw on to support their appeals for legal recognition of Aboriginal title, Culhane asks what assumptions, beliefs, and cultural values the Crown relies on to assert and defend their claims to hold legitimate sovereignty and jurisdiction over lands and resources in B.C. What empirical evidence does the Crown present to bolster its arguments? What can thus be learned by anthropologists and the public at large about the historical and contemporary culture of the powerful?
Focusing in particular on the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en case, the book traces the trial of Delgamuukw. v. Regina from its first hearing during 1987 and 1991 to its successful appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, which issued a landmark ruling on the case on December 11, 1997.
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The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree
$20.00Set in the near future in the mountainous and fielded cusp between BC and Alberta, The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree by Josh Massey is the story of Jeffery Inkster, an ex-hipster-turned elk farmer. Inkster, whose goal is to live peacefully with his elk, harvesting their antlers, becomes embroiled in the political violence of oil-pipeline expansion.
Drawing from his experience working in the “Peace Country” of northern BC, Massey brings us the story of a community of artists and eccentrics who all become suspects in a series of pipeline bombings. But, amid the activism and counter-terrorism, there are other, more mysterious forces at play, forces that eat into the consciousness of all those involved.
Terrifying, hilarious, and suspenseful, this novel offers a satirical perspective of industrial society that will at once unsettle readers and present them with a cathartic release from the exasperation they might feel living in a civilization teetering towards environmental collapse.
Fans of metafiction, especially those who enjoy works with a thriller edge, and admirers of the works of writers Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges and filmmakers Christopher Nolan, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch, will appreciate this post-modern take on contemporary industrial and environmental politics through storytelling.
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The Pochsy Plays
$18.95Beckett meets Betty Boop in this trilogy of monologues by Canadian cult heroine Pochsy, a nasty, vapid, utterly charming vixen. In Pochsy’s Lips, she’s in the hospital, convinced she’s sick because she’s got a squid where her heart should be. In Oh Baby, she’s at the Last Resort, on holiday from her job packing mercury. And in Citizen Pochsy, our little minx is in the waiting room at an audit from hell. In The Pochsy Plays, Hines remodels and melds traditions like stand-up, absurdism, clowning and neo-cabaret to create some of the most original and cutting satire to hit the stage – and, now, the page. Walk a mile in her distressed calfskin boots as the dark and ditzy Pochsy garbles ad slogans, self-help mantras and desperate grabs at meaning into a postmodern pastiche that is hilarious and harrowing, sweet and bitter at the same time. With extensive photos and musical scores, and an introduction by Darren O’Donnell.
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The Poetic Edda
$23.95Gods, giants, violence, the undead, theft, trolls, dwarves, aphorisms, unrequited love, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, the creation of the cosmos and a giant wolf are just some of the elements dwelling within these Norse poetic tales. Committed to velum anonymously in Iceland around 1270, they were flash frozen from much-older oral versions that had been circulating throughout Northern Europe for centuries. The Poetic Edda is an epoch-making cache of mythological and heroic tales that have compelled Wagner, Tolkien, Borges and Auden, among many others. It is one of the few extent sources that provide a periscope into the Viking Age consciousness.
In this rousing line-by-line translation, award-winning poet Jeramy Dodds transmits the Old Icelandic text into English, placing it in the hands of poetry fans and academics alike, without chipping the patina of the original.
‘Jeremy Dodds’s instinctive irony and musicality is a particularly apt fit for the idiosyncratic syntax and symbolism of Old Norse.’
– ARC Poetry Magazine
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The Point!
$24.95Missing everything but the point: visual poetry celebrating excitement!
The exclamation point is much maligned. It’s bad style. It’s like laughing at your own joke. It screams, it yells, it’s hysterical, it’s maybe even embarrassingly obsequious.
Nasser Hussain disagrees! What’s so bad about expressing enthusiasm? What if you really need to scream? The prescriptions of ‘style’ can feel like an artificial limit placed on our language, insisting we produce a bland monotone that trades on its appearance as rational, subdued, civilized discourse. Against this, The Point!, where poetry bangs its head against this veneer of rationality. Poetry, it insists, is exciting! Is, maybe, excitement itself!
The Point! is composed using only exclamation marks, seeking to reclaim the dignity of the bang’s and explore its expressive possibilities. Against the well-known derision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, and Gertrude Stein, Hussain uses the exclamation point to make a point: let’s celebrate the possibility of enthusiasm!
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The Polar World
$4.95The Polar World combines fantasy and reality: giant squids, hybrids, and humanoid figures dance across Ashoona’s sensual vistas, lending a surreal quality to her work. Springing her imagination but rooted in the landscape of her Kinngait home, The Polar World combines Ashoona’s drawings from her 2017 exhibition with a narrative by Andrew Hunter.
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The Politics of Knives
$17.95Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards)
If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. Finding the language of violence and the violence in language, Jonathan Ball becomes the Stephen King of verse.
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The Pollination Field
$21.00Kim Fahner’s The Pollination Field is a poetic foray into the literal and metaphorical world of bees, but it also includes an exploration of other pollinators—bats, beetles, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and even humans. In these poems, Fahner continues with her poetic observation and documentation of how the human world impacts the environment, but also incorporates myth and feminism in her consideration of how women evolve over time.
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The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories
$18.95Henry W. Tate (d. 1914) was a Tsimshian informant to ethnographer Franz Boas. Tate first wrote these stories in English before giving Boas the Tsimshian equivalent during the decade of 1903-1913. Boas published the stories in the much-consulted classic of ethnology, Tsimshian Mythology, in 1916. Through Ralph Maud’s selection of the best of Tate’s original stories, we can see the actual creative writer behind Boas’ revised texts, now preserved much closer to the way Tate originally intended.
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The Porcupinity of the Stars
$16.95Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is ‘Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.’ The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and acutely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion and invention.
‘Between the freaky, funny filmmaker Guy Maddin and author Gary Barwin, Canada is producing some of the most innovative creative works of our time.’ – Utne Reader
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The Port Inventory
$18.00The Saint Lawrence River glides beneath high windows while, close by, schoolchildren’s bright winter coats glow in Parthenais Prison’s shade. In a hotel on a cliff above Biarritz, a man peers down into a darkened courtyard and thinks he hears low sobbing through the plashing of a fountain. In an east coast fishing village, a bedridden child experiences heightened lucidity in delirium. A slum landlord in Prince Rupert gives lessons on the British Empire. These are a few moments in The Port Inventory. Spanning the distances between the Newfoundland fishing village where he grew up and Montreal, the city he has made his home, McGrath’s poems drop a ladder into memory’s root cellar and find it luminescent.
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The Portfolio Chef
$18.95The Portfolio Chef is a guide to understanding and creating a financial investment portfolio. For the novice to the experienced investor, it takes the mystery out of the intimidating world of investments and the stock market. Using food analogies, the book describes stocks, bonds, and preferred shares, among others, and how to invest in them. Why the food analogy? Similarly to having a well-balanced meal, an investor should have a well-balanced portfolio. So bonds are equated with potatoes, blue chip stocks with meat, and speculative stocks with dessert. The Portfolio Chef describes and explains the various types of investments available and then explains how to choose the ones suitable for each individual. With a majority of adults earning or inheriting higher levels of assets, this book is a must-read to become a well-informed investor. Most publications forget that everyone begins as a novice, but The Portfolio Chef does not. Even for the experienced investor, this book is a tool to help the reader better understand the importance of having a suitable asset mix and risk exposure. As statistics show, the population has an active interest in investing. With the burgeoning popularity of the Internet and its role in increasing the accessibility of information, more people are able to provide their own services in a way that would not have been possible a decade ago. The Portfolio Chef is tailor-made to reach the people who are comfortable researching for themselves, but haven’t yet found the appropriate resources. It delivers powerful knowledge in a way that is easy to digest.
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The Power of Ignorance
$19.95Join certified Ig-master Vaguen on the road to bliss. You might think that ignorance comes naturally, but on the contrary, the world conspires to cram our heads full of useless and dangerous know-ledge every day. Fall off this know-ledge into the safe and comforting world of oblivio(n/ousness) by discovering The Power of Ignorance. In his seminars, Vaguen has helped successful people, wealthy people, good-looking people, and people just like you to attain the heights/depths of ignorance. For the first time, his secrets are revealed between the covers of a book. Purchase this reasonably-priced volume and join the ranks of those who understand that a lack of understanding is unimportant. Based on original material and characters by Jeff Sumerel and Sam Reynolds.
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The Power of Ignorance: The Play
$14.95Your brain cells are prison cells! Break free with The Power of Ignorance, the smash Fringe play! Join certified Ig-master Vaguen on the road to bliss. You might think that ignorance comes naturally, but on the contrary, the world conspires to cram our heads full of useless and dangerous know-ledge every day. Fall off this knowledge into the safe and comforting world of oblivio(n/ousness) by discovering The Power of Ignorance. In this playscript Vaguen is featured at one of his seminars where he helps successful people, wealthy people, good-looking people, and people just like you to attain the heights/depths of ignorance.
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The Power of Story
$22.95Award-winning Indigenous author Harold R. Johnson discusses the promise and potential of storytelling.
Approached by an ecumenical society representing many faiths, from Judeo-Christians to fellow members of First Nations, Harold R. Johnson agreed to host a group who wanted to hear him speak about the power of storytelling. This book is the outcome of that gathering. In The Power of Story, Johnson explains the role of storytelling in every aspect of human life, from personal identity to history and the social contracts that structure our societies, and illustrates how we can direct its potential to re-create and reform not only our own lives, but the life we share. Companionable, clear-eyed, and, above all, optimistic, Johnson’s message is both a dire warning and a direct invitation to each of us to imagine and create, together, the world we want to live in.